


my heart is los angeles

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Music RPF, Soundcloud Rappers
Genre: M/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Recreational Drug Use, extended and possibly torturous metaphors regarding the city of los angeles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 03:29:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14155656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: Sometimes, when Matt hasn't answered his phone in a day or two, Aaron checks the weather in Los Angeles.





	my heart is los angeles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BeatlessMelody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeatlessMelody/gifts).



> i just kind of don't know anymore. 
> 
> enjoy xoxo

So it's Los Angeles. So it's something the wrong side of midnight, so Matt has a handful of Aaron's hair in his fist. So they're on the porch of some rich asshole with more money than taste, more glitter than diamonds. Matt's body presses against his spine like a pyroclastic flow. Catastrophic heat. 

“So you wanna live forever,” Matt sings in his ear, rough voice, whiskey voice, a voice of California roundness and slurred syllables. The rum and coke is thick and xylitol sweet in the glass sweating in his hand but it's not as sweet as Matt's breath against the shell of his ear. “So you fucking wanna live for fucking ever.”

Aaron takes a sip. Watches Los Angeles’s jeweled glitter under its own haze and feels carbonation all the way down. Chemical burn on his tongue. Matt pressed like a gun to his back, a loaded metaphor. 

“So I wanna live forever,” he sings back, badly, off-key. Matt's grin pressed to the hollow under his ear still feels like the barrel of a gun. He's drunk but it's Matt more than the rum, it's the rich-ass porch more than the vodka. There's menthol nicotine on the back of his teeth and yeah, he's gonna live forever, yeah. 

He's lost on this kid, on the city of Los Angeles distilled down into shifty eyes and a sinning mouth and wrists that break like twigs. He's so far gone it doesn't matter, never mattered, when he first met him he'd known he would follow Matt through whatever hell the kid walked into. 

Stupid. He's blind with it. He knows it. Hallelujah. Whatever. 

They've got five minutes. The party always finds Matt, is the thing, he goes and goes and doesn't stop like some awful fey perpetual machine. They've got like five minutes, maybe six, before someone comes looking and Matt's hands are in his hair and weaving halos from cigarette smoke. Aaron wants to grab them. To hold fire for a moment. 

He's not Prometheus; he's the poor asshole Prometheus handed fire too, some lovestruck fool idiot watching tragedy walk away from him with all the answers in his hands. 

“I can hear your teeth grinding from fuckin' here,” Matt murmurs. Another halo of smoke. God bless you. “What're you thinking about so hard?” 

_How you act like you're richer than god and I know you're not but the way you play it, Christ god, so careless, even I believe it._

The whole city is an opal below them and it's all theirs, hallelujah, amen. He'll take it, he can taste it on is tongue and there's nothing better, smog like blood, metal like the edge of a wound. He'll take it, but it's always going to belong to Matt. 

“I'm not thinking shit,” he answers, he's honest but only most of the time and he never breaks a promise anymore but there's some shit that doesn't need to be aired. There's some stuff that stays in his ribcage like wet paper, thready and hyperreal and clogging, but he likes it that way. He tells himself he likes it that way. 

A breath in his ear. Matt's cherry hot against his arm, it's gonna be a burn soon but Aaron can't be assed to care, not with the lie in his mouth and Matt knowing it, pressed up against his back so Aaron pretends he can feel his heartbeat. So it goes. 

A woman stumbling through the porch door, heels long enough to say she's dangerous, drunk enough she doesn't notice Matt straightening up, stepping away. There's no way for her to know the grief of the coldness where Matt's body heat had been but Aaron shakes himself, snags the butt from Matt's hand and takes the last drag. 

He breathes out over her greeting, Matt's answer, the words Aaron doesn't listen to but the voice he does. _So you want to fuckin’ live forever, yeah._

* * *

It starts like this. 

He meets a skinny, twinky junkie of a kid and he falls in love. 

He never claimed to be a smart man. The forecast calls for humidity down from the bay, a pretty 63 degree day.

* * *

He likes the touring, of course he likes the touring, he loves shows and he’d die or kill to be on stage but there’s something about the bump of wheels hitting the tarmac of the city that just feels like clicking back into place. 

He’s home. He’s home, baby, the city better be ready for it, he’s got the taste of asphalt in his teeth and it breaks sticky-sweet if he decides to bite down. 

Instead he goes back to his apartment. Pent-up electricity vibrating at the ends of his fingers, the circular motion of his pulse building up and up to some inevitable crescendo. He doesn’t miss the long nights in a cold bus, the cold hotel rooms, but he is happy he leaves if it means he can come home. 

He fucking loves this city. He loves coming home. He wants that fever pitch, wants his fingers shaking as he reaches for a pen. 

He doesn’t check the weather, he checks his texts instead. He knows it’s a smoggy day when he’s got a string of nonsense one-word gibberish, knows it’s overcast when he just has one text, knows it’s beautiful and smooth sailing when he has nothing at all. 

He’d hit the tarmac and checked his texts before he looked out the window. He knows the weather and he knows he’s got nothing but clear skies, befitting summer.

* * *

He watches Matt drag his key through the crisp paint of his Jeep in big jagged sweeps that bite at the roof of his mouth. 

There’s a cigarette hanging from his slack lips, lighting up his face warm in the cold of the floodlit night, wreathing everything he does in a halo of VHS fuzz, imprecise, unreal. He breathes in and breathes out through his nose like it doesn’t hurt. His eyes are heavy-lidded and a little too blank behind the pink acetone of the sunglasses he doesn’t need and Aaron’s pretty sure he’s sober, but not _entirely_ sure. 

He gets his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels and bears witness. 

There’s an edge of a tune running through his head by the time Matt stumbles back like a string-cut marionette. A note struck in splintering paint and screaming metal. A simple scale of notes, down-up-down again, something he could whistle but doesn’t really wanna crack the air with. He files it away as Matt turns to him because there’s something about it that aches like a bitten cheek. 

He’d come running when Matt called because of course he did, of course he would, he always will. Because he can’t say no to this boy and especially not when his breathing had shuddered like that through the speakers, words bitten out quick and sharp and not like him at all. 

“Well,” Matt says, and then, “We- _ell_.” He draws it out all drawling and tremulous. 

Aaron doesn’t say anything right away. Just rocks forward onto his toes again and looks past the cruel sweep of Matt’s eyelashes at the damage he’s done to his car. It’s probably fixable if Matt throws enough money at it, if he doesn’t just drive it around and spin a legend out of it, crystallize it like amber in a lyric. 

He thinks nothing about any song either of them could make could capture how awful it is, to watch Matt give way under his own weight, to watch him lashing out in trembling desperation at something Aaron can’t see. Something he won’t let Aaron see. He won’t say that but he wonders if Matt would understand if he _did_ say it. 

He can taste the edges of it in the air. Sour sweat, salt on the tongue, chemical numb and sweet. Smog and plastic. 

“Coulda written a name,” he says because he has no fucking idea what he could say to make any difference. 

Matt looks at him and then back at the car and the keys jingle to the ground musically. 

“Not enough room,” he says, forlorn, and then he’s past Aaron, sailing into the house in a sweep of cigarette smoke and expensive cologne. Aaron stares down at the keys on the pavement. 

* * *

Summer’s cracking open across the pavement hell of Los Angeles like an avenging angel and Aaron watches it come with open arms. He stands out on the doorstep of the studio and feels the air cooking around him as he chainsmokes and it hurts but it hurts like a fever hurts, like a kiln, like he’s baking out the imperfections. 

He opens his arms to the sun for a moment and grins into it. 

He’s wet with sweat and disgusting and victorious with it when he stomps back inside and there’s a song under his tongue, he can taste it metal-sharp like a razor blade. There are so many things lined up at the back of his throat, but this song, the song drumming at his pulse like it wants to put his body in time with it, it isn’t any of those. 

It sounds like a trainwreck. It sounds like heartache and bitter coke stink under his nails. He grins all-teeth at his producer, smiling uncertainly back. 

“This one’s gonna be good,” Aaron snaps and flicks his fingers at the man until the door to the booth opens. 

* * *

Matt doesn’t invite him to the party but he texts the address to Aaron and when he rolls up Matt’s waiting for him on the porch in a haze of smoke and hangers-on, an edge to his smile that says he’s so very far from sober. This shit, he never gets tired of it. It’s better than an invitation; it’s private attention. 

He leans into Aaron’s smile and there’s no alcohol on his breath, thank fucking god, but there’s a shine to his gaze that bleeds. A shine like a knife. Aaron doesn’t look away soon enough. 

Matt’s smile goes slick and beautiful and dangerous, shy and sly. It isn’t his real smile. Aaron’s pretty sure he’ll know Matt’s real smile when he sees it. 

“She’s here,” Matt murmurs against his shoulder and he should have known, really. All his heart tangled up in this skinny little kid’s hoodie strings, and Matt’s still in love with every L.A. mirage the world can throw at him. He’s always watched Matt’s heart grow and wane and crack and burn like a phoenix, it’s only different because this one time Matt’s mouth is shaping her name against his skin instead of against a mic. 

“Sorry,” Aaron says, because he isn’t, not really, but he thinks Matt probably wants him to be. 

He grins up at Aaron through his lashes. There are people watching but still Aaron thinks of kissing him, thinks of how it would taste of nicotine and the bitter pill dissolving on Matt’s tongue, how it would be disastrous and the end of him. How he wants it anyway. He really does feel like some awful melodramatic Greek epic. 

He puts the thought away carefully. Lays it aside. It’s nothing. He’d never do it. 

Matt looks at him as if he can see what Aaron’s thinking, though there’s no way he could. 

“Lemme get you a drink,” he murmurs and Aaron’s chest aches. 

* * *

The party is something like a hurricane. 

It spirals out from Matt in ugly waves of buffeting pressure and Aaron can feel it tugging at the edges of his awareness, storm-pressure, the need to batten down the hatches and brace the levees. There is danger here. He can hear a girl crying deeper in the house. There’s screaming come from the backyard, Bacchanalian, ecstasy at the point of terror. 

Rich people parties. 

He grins at Matt through it because bravado has always served him best. 

Matt hands him a cocktail, pink because of course it is, an ice cube swirling in the glass like an afterthought. When he sniffs it loudly the alcohol-stink burns his nose and Matt grins harder, like a mad thing. He’d shed his entourage like it wasn’t a thing, like shrugging people away with a flick of his fingers was casual. Aaron bets it probably is. 

“Helluva a party,” he murmurs. Matt nods, sways in closer. 

A hand finds his elbow. He glances down at it and pretends the fact that his gaze doesn’t linger prevents the sight from being seared into it. He wants Matt’s fingers wrapped around his elbow like this. He always does and it’s not new and it’s not terribly important. 

“Hollywood,” Matt spits with soft venom, a curse under his breath. It’s a little hypocritical, Aaron thinks, and knows he isn’t wrong even though he wishes he were. Matt’s everything there is to love about Hollywood, the whole city of Los Angeles in a pretty junkie boy. 

“Hollywood,” he echoes, reproving. If it weren’t Hollywood it would be NYC and if it weren’t there then he doesn’t know where Matt would be. He needs a city as grand in scale as what happens in his head, a mountain made out of diamonds and tiny tragedies. Miami in its heyday. A rainy London street. Paris, Matt’s fetish for fashion driving him up the Rue leaking money and mystique. 

“We should go shopping,” he says, words slicking out of his mouth like oil, not what he wanted to say but something like something he might want to say if he could just stop for a second to strategize. He wants more, he always wants more. Matt grins anway, hand stealing its way to Aaron’s hip and pausing there, cool pressure because Matt’s hands are always so cold. 

“Oh, shit, yes,” he says and sways into Aaron’s space. A breath of warmth, soft against Aaron’s cheek. 

His eyes move away out of a strict and militant sense of self preservation. They pass through an ostentatiously well-lit doorway and light on her because how could they not; because she lights up the room and she always has, because she’s larger than life, because her laugh is kind of shrill and he’s always had an ear for it despite himself. He’s a jealous bitch, he’ll admit as much. 

“Don't look,” Aaron says uselessly because it was a moot point from the start. Matt turns because he was always going to see. 

He turns back looking like a graveyard, tombstone teeth, rot on his tongue. His lips are pulled back into a grin spiteful like cement at the terminus of a car crash. 

“I told you she was invited,” he hums, a rattlesnake, dead eyes and every syllable clicking. It burns, and if Aaron unfocuses just a little he can see her head tipping back in laughter. 

“Woulda shown up anyway,” he mumbles because he's drunk, idiot, _stupid_. He's truthful especially when he shouldn't be. 

He wonders what it's like for a whole city to love you. Love you so much it hates you. Later maybe he'll drink more and ask her.

* * *

Sometimes, when Matt hasn't answered his phone in a day or two, Aaron checks the weather in Los Angeles.

* * *

Ari is stoned and smearing the line between sitting and laying, a long tangle of limbs and frayed cotton and cheap grass when he looks over at Aaron and Aaron braces himself for whatever’s coming. 

He’s not as stoned as Ari but it doesn’t really make a difference when Ari tilts his head and says “You gotta write more love songs, my dude.” 

“I- what?” he previcates, because he’s actually pretty seriously stoned and a little bit drunk too just to be on the safe side. He’s thinking like a ship at sea, lost to the wind, turning slowly, he loses the trail of the metaphor almost as soon as it lines up. 

Ari blinks slowly and smiles the vacant smile of the truly baked, stutters out another semaphore set of blinks before he shrugs. 

“You write about, about fucking… fucking being rich in L.A. and shit. You know?” 

The thought drips down the back of Aaron’s throat that he does write a hell of a lot about living in Los Angeles, and there’s no real way for anyone else to know those count as love songs. Then he thinks about the bong, and how he could really go for another hit, like right now, immediately. 

“More love songs. Chicks…” Ari wobbles a hand up to flop at the air, conjuring shapes out of the haze. His mouth works a little. “The ladies _love_ love.” 

Aaron barks out a laugh and it chokes coming out. 

“You’re a fuckin, a fucking poet, Jesus _Christ_.” 

Ari’s head tips back against the back of the couch, a long line of throat working, sensuous and ascetic in the dim sun slotted through the shades. His hair is falling in his face all lanky and grease-heavy, a glassy beetle-dark eye rolling to see Aaron. 

“Bitch,” he throws lovingly between them and the eye slips closed.

* * *

He thinks about kissing Matt sometimes. 

He knows how it would go. Laying Matt down, kissing him gently, pressing in with his teeth just to be sure. How Matt’s mouth would be soft, open so easily, how he’d let Aaron kiss him and kiss him and kiss him and then how he’d never call Aaron again. How he’d catch the shadow of himself in a song later, something about Los Angeles and cutting lines with cards and being so rich that kissing God seemed like a good idea. 

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t lose what he has, what he has is more than enough. 

He’s still hungry. Hungry for it in the pit of his stomach, in the ache of his fingertips. 

* * *

There's a rim of powder white around Mat’s nostril and his eyes are black glass, pretty dark mirrors. Aaron reaches out and presses with the flat of his thumb, crushes the coke back into Matt's skin. 

“Sniff,” he says, and Matt does, and he doesn't look away until Aaron takes his hand back. There's a little left on his thumb and he slides it along his gums, savors the numbness, the nothing sweetness that follows. Matt watches, quiet, a silent disaster until his head is tilting. 

“Do you want to live forever, yeah,” he whispers, sings, it's on the edge of something like a song and Aaron wants to dare him into it. Wants to tie him down into melody and verse and make him human, make him attainable, unmake him as a fucking archetype so Aaron can love him and be done with it. There’s that stupid melody running through his head again, down-up-down. 

It could be so easy. 

“Yeah I wanna live forever,” he sings back, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” and Matt smiles at him like heartbreak.

* * *

He’s hopeless, and he knows it, and it doesn’t bother him as much as it should. 

_miss you_ , he sends, his lips are numb and wine-stained and he's reckless with it, then _how's Chicago_. 

_2 days,_ Matt sends back, hours later, the bottle gone and a new house packed full of people, half a jack and coke gone by and that restless pricking at the tips of his fingers. 

He checks the weather in L.A. and it's 82 degrees and sunny.

* * *

Two days later he breaks into Aaron’s house, for a given value of breaking that means that Aaron’s kind of always been bad at locking his front door. Aaron is trying to retrieve a guitar pick from under the counter and he doesn’t really know how long Matt stands and watches him before deciding to speak. 

“Tour’s going great,” is what he says and Aaron swears and nearly shatters his skull on the underside of his counter, which hurts a hell of a lot more than he expected it to. A little nova in his skull whiting him out down the the simplest impulse of kneel and clutch at the top of his head and sob for air and occasionally bark out a shattered swear word. 

He gets to his feet eventually and Matt is waiting for him. 

He’s framed against Aaron’s messy kitchen for the brief moment Aaron gets of seeing him before he realizes he’s being seen and he reminds Aaron a little bit of the scrawny deer of Runyon Canyon, skittish, trash-scraps-lean and knowing. In a breath he’s moving and the impression is still there but it’s more difficult to see under the soft denim, the Gucci cotton, the pink acetone hooked into the collar of his shirt. 

He leans back against the table like the motion is political, like he’s about to win a war in the doing of it. It’s a tectonic motion. It shifts everything. 

Matt's fingertips look too delicate under the flush of his nails. Like Aaron can see the fine bones under his skin. The swell of knuckle, skin taut and white, deceptive hands, deceptively soft. He looks away before he puts those fingers in his mouth to taste. 

Matt's watching him. Aaron wants to tug the dip of his jeans lower, the wings of Matt's hip bones spreading, the scroll of tattoos, the places he wants to put his thumbs and _press_. He thinks Matt's waist would fit his hands a little too well. 

He blinks first which is in its own way a confession. When he looks again Matt is looking back, sly through lidded eyes. 

“Hey,” Aaron says, and the moment breaks open. 

Matt’s brows crease, a line between them, a crack in his facade. His eyes focusing down through the layers of whatever he sees that isn’t _real_ until he’s meeting Aaron’s gaze and it’s electric. It’s something unprecedented. 

“You’re too good for me,” Matt says in reply and the emphasis is all wrong. Heavy on the _good_ and not enough pressure on the _too_. He’s too good. Aaron is too good and it tastes bitter coming up, like heartburn. 

God help him, he still wants Matt so badly his mouth is the Sahara. 

_I don’t have to be good,_ he wants to say but the words stick in his throat. He does want to be good. He wants to be good for Matt.

* * *

He's sprawled out on the asphalt, sticky and sunny, leftovers hot and smelling like a furnace, and he laughs and laughs until someone on the sidewalk stops and stares. _What_ , he wants to say, _what the fuck are you looking at, this is Los fucking Angeles. This isn't strange._

He's sinking under the tide of it but he pulls out his phone and it's 117 degrees, not a cloud in sight.


End file.
